I wrote a tweet this morning about some of the responses I've gotten to questions I've asked to some rather promenent users.  I made mention that almost everyone is willing to give 140 characters, it's a small investment.  People walking down the street will barely give you a look, but in-person communication greatly differs from over-the-internet communication.  Even Steve Jobs has been known to send a less than 140 character email back to random customers asking questions.  Seems like 140 is the magic number.

You could argue that 2 way pagers and SMS were the beginning of the sub-140 revolution, but what differs about Twitter is the public nature of the service.  You can't text someone without their phone number.  You can message anyone with a Twitter account and they would see it (of course if their account is private you wouldn't see a response).

Businesses have slowly adopted the public facing service for instant support.  I've personally received support from @XBoxSupport, @TWCableHelp, and others along the way with great success.  Breaking news spreads through the world quicker than the Associated Press and TV.  Both examples utilize less than 140 characters.  Newspaper, magazine, blog writers all the same are learning to pack their headlines in less than 140 characters to garner attention and stand out in the ultra-fast flow of information.

The sub-140 culture has opened up a new era of support, both personal and professional.  So the next big question is, when will words per minute be replaced with characters per minute?

When I finally realized that getting an iPhone was is my imminent future, I did as I normally do and began to gather information about the general Apple culture, info on all their products, and of course the best sites for updates to said information.  As you can imagine, there are a ton of sites dedicated to the iPhone specifically and the Apple company as a whole.  Throughout my parsing from these sites, references to "Gruber" kept popping up.  Not knowing who or what a "Gruber" was, I did a quick search and came upon John Gruber's site Daring Fireball (http://www.daringfireball.net) and quickly became a daily (if not more than daily) reader.

Gruber is a completely different breed of "blogger" (I hesitate to use this term, as he doesn't operate as such which I will explain later).  Your standard tech blogs have posts about rumors, upcoming products, and reviews.  Daring Fireball will contain links to these, however he typically adds a short couple of lines with what appears to be his "gut reaction", which are often on point and objective.  He also will write expanded articles based on topics that deserve more than a few lines, such as the iPhone 4 prototype mess and Antennagate, which are extremely in depth and well written.  The style of the site is simple and full of great information.  Daring Fireball does not allow comments, which Gruber had a great back and forth with Joe Wilcox back in June (Link: http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair). ; From the same article, Gruber writes:

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

This gets back to the main point as to why I respect John Gruber.  So many tech sites floating around are padded with garbage data, unfounded rumors and horrible commenters.  While I still frequent those sites, I have to parse through the fluff to get to the good info.  I know that as soon as I load DF, there will not be a single article on there that will waste my time.  Now I know many people like to classify Gruber as a Apple fanboy, he even gets attention from Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons) and most of the tech sites with that label.  Yes, he is Apple heavy, but not in a way that shoves Apple down your throat.  In fact, most of his insider Apple info is rock solid.  I've learned a lot from his site and honestly agree with about 90% of what he writes, which is hard to admit as I am known to have some strong opinions when it comes to technology.

I know I'm a no-name tech enthusiast and it's 99% likely John won't even read this blog, but I wanted to write about it because his site has provided me a totally different arena for technology news.  I appreciate his attention to detail and insider insight, as well as the passion in his writing.  It's hard to find on the internet but it's refreshing to see.